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The game developer Frogmind hails from Helsinki, Finland, the home of a different videogame studio known for its physics-heavy mobile games about birds.
But the birds that star in Frogmind's game aren't angry. They're terrified.
The first level of Badland, a new game for iPhone and iPad, is among the most delightful introductions to any videogame I've played recently.
Although it's nearly impossible to fail the first level, dozens of swinging, rolling, plummeting dangers crash into the path of your vaguely owl-shaped avatar, but he bounces harmlessly off of everything. With each collision, his eyes swell to an unlikely size and he seems to briefly lose his sense of direction, flapping wildly to right himself.
Over the course of the adventure, the globular owl-critter encounters magnetic powerups. These can alter his size, slow down time or even create ten clones of himself, which then all go flapping around the level together. Clones follow in a cluster and are controlled the same way the lead owlet is, with a single tap on the screen.
In a particularly smart design decision, the "lead bird" is actually just whichever owl is currently farthest ahead of all the others. It doesn't matter which bird you started the level with—he's just as disposable as all the rest. So long as one single fellow survives, the game's camera centers on him, and victory remains within reach.
This mechanic breeds a system of necessary sacrifice.
Sometimes it's necessary to split your shadowy parliament among two or more paths. Both groupings must then be navigated separately, yet carefully, although in all likelihood one group will end up left behind after they flip a switch or otherwise clear the way for their luckier brothers.
Badland is at its best when it's crashing forward at full speed, with dozens of bouncing, tiny birds blasting through obstacles. Hundreds could get smashed, slashed or splattered, but I always found at least one bird that I decided would be the one that had to make it.
In later levels, things slowed down and the puzzles became increasingly tedious. Most were not challenges of wit, but of reflexes; failure was punished with forced restarts. Several brutal segments demanded five or more tries, each more damaging to my enjoyment of Badland than the last.
Not much is told to us about the world of Badland, but we do at least know that it's populated by exceedingly creepy rabbits (near the end of the game, a dead one is seen hanging by a rope) and that its overseers have a flip attitude about the morality of owl clone murder. The interactive portion of the world is obscured entirely in darkness, but in the distance we can see a land with color and greenery and fauna to spare.
Eventually, the fuzzy creatures in the back are replaced by menacing robotic overlords. It must be assumed that these are the nasties that strung up Mr. Rabbit and laid out an incredibly complex series of deadly but eventually surmountable challenges in a touch-screen-friendly two-dimensional arrangement.
